`*-apple-tvos`

aarch64-apple-tvos
x86_64-apple-tvos

Tier: 3

Apple tvOS targets:

Apple tvOS on aarch64
Apple tvOS Simulator on x86_64

These targets are cross-compiled. You will need appropriate versions of Xcode and the SDKs for tvOS (AppleTVOS.sdk) and/or the tvOS Simulator (AppleTVSimulator.sdk) to build a toolchain and target these platforms.

The targets support most (see below) of the standard library including the allocator to the best of my knowledge, however they are very new, not yet well-tested, and it is possible that there are various bugs.

In theory we support back to tvOS version 7.0, although the actual minimum version you can target may be newer than this, for example due to the versions of Xcode and your SDKs.

As with the other Apple targets, rustc respects the common environment variables used by Xcode to configure this, in this case TVOS_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET.

Incompletely supported library functionality

As mentioned, "most" of the standard library is supported, which means that some portions are known to be unsupported. The following APIs are currently known to have missing or incomplete support:

std::process::Command's API will return an error if it is configured in a manner which cannot be performed using posix_spawn -- this is because the more flexible fork/exec-based approach is prohibited on these platforms in favor of posix_spawn{,p} (which still probably will get you rejected from app stores, so is likely sideloading-only). A concrete set of cases where this will occur is difficult to enumerate (and would quickly become stale), but in some cases it may be worked around by tweaking the manner in which Command is invoked.

Building the target

The targets can be built by enabling them for a rustc build in config.toml, by adding, for example:

[build]
build-stage = 1
target = ["aarch64-apple-tvos", "x86_64-apple-tvos", "aarch64-apple-tvos-sim"]

It's possible that cargo under -Zbuild-std may also be used to target them.

Building Rust programs

Note: Building for this target requires the corresponding TVOS SDK, as provided by Xcode.

Rust programs can be built for these targets

$ rustc --target aarch64-apple-tvos your-code.rs
...
$ rustc --target x86_64-apple-tvos your-code.rs
...
$ rustc --target aarch64-apple-tvos-sim your-code.rs

Testing

There is no support for running the Rust or standard library testsuite on tvOS or the simulators at the moment. Testing has mostly been done manually with builds of static libraries called from Xcode or a simulator.

It hopefully will be possible to improve this in the future.

Cross-compilation toolchains and C code

This target can be cross-compiled from x86_64 or aarch64 macOS hosts.

Other hosts are not supported for cross-compilation, but might work when also providing the required Xcode SDK.

The rustc book